A Celebration of Bach, as a Counterpoise to Painful Memories

What does Bach, or any classical composer, have to do with Sept. 11? For most people nothing, but for some of us everything.

Trinity Church’s weeklong series of concerts and observances of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, Remember to Love, when I caught up with it on Wednesday, set me to thinking about incomprehensibility. This was a program of Bach at One, a permanent midday series by the Trinity Choir at St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity’s satellite a few blocks to the north on lower Broadway and across the street from the site of the World Trade Center. Julian Wachner, Trinity’s music director, conducted, and Renée Anne Louprette, Trinity’s organist, opened with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in B minor (BWV 544) on the chapel’s Schlicker instrument, which suffered damage from dust and grime in the aftermath of Sept. 11 but has been beautifully restored. (Trinity’s own organ, also damaged, was replaced with an elaborate digital apparatus in 2003, a temporary recourse still in place.)

By definition, thinking about incomprehensibility can go only so far, and I keep coming back to the emotive and spiritual power of Bach’s music — barely comprehensible in its quantity and consistent quality, its originality, its unfailing intelligence and deep humanity: in short, its majesty — as a counterpoise to the incomprehensible horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. The notion is hardly novel: for others the offsetting beauty might come from another composer, from Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Tolstoy.

More than that, the simple dichotomy of unimaginable good and evil, beauty and hideousness, is common to most religions, where incomprehensibility is often called mystery, but I don’t for a moment mean to impute any divinity to Bach. To the contrary, it is the basic ordinariness of the man — overworked, ridden with quotidian cares and more than a little ornery by nature — that makes his achievement so utterly unfathomable.

So all the Bach near ground zero — cantatas and motets by the Trinity Choir; cantatas by the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Pa., conducted by Greg Funfgeld; more organ works by Ms. Louprette — made perfect sense to me. But in a real surprise Trinity managed to put another musical face on its remembrance, that of Maurice Duruflé: by comparison, a much more modest figure in the classical music world. (He received less than a page in the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in contrast to Bach’s more than 72 pages.)

Duruflé, who died in Paris in 1986, had a particular gift for using ancient chant melodies to spawn larger structures without sacrificing their essential contours and character. He displayed it in his chaste and elegant Requiem of 1947, his best-known work, which Mr. Wachner presented with his other choir, the Washington Chorus, at Trinity on Friday. Less well known are the Four Motets of 1960, but Mr. Wachner chose one of them, “Ubi Caritas,” as a sort of theme song for all the concerts on Friday, the heart of the week’s events.

Photo

Trinity Church held “Remember to Love,” a series of concerts and observances of the 10th anniversary of 9/11.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

The Friday concerts — which featured, along with the choruses already mentioned, the New York City Master Chorale, led by Thea Kano; the Copley Singers of Boston, led by Brian Jones; and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, led by Francisco J. Núñez — ran hourly from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., alternating between Trinity and St. Paul’s. A full-length concert at 8:30 brought all the adult groups together, and on Saturday the Trinity Choir was back to its Bach at One.

“Ubi Caritas” — its text proclaiming that where charity and love abide, God is there — was sung by each choir: in its original chant form by the youth choir and in the glorious Duruflé setting by the others. I heard it seven times and missed an eighth only when, because of the ripple effect from a late-running Eucharist service at Trinity, I was late getting to St. Paul’s for the Master Chorale program. Few tunes come to mind that I would rather hear seven times in a day.

That late-running service produced another welcome overlap when, near the end, the Trinity Choir sang a lovely rendition of “Amazing Grace,” with the first verse given a gripping solo turn by Thomas McCargar, a baritone, that pulled me into a pew. That night in the big concert the singer and songwriter Melanie DeMore led the audience in singing “Amazing Grace.” You loved the communal spirit; you wished you could have heard more of a solo rendition from the soulful Ms. DeMore.

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In this context the details of performances were mostly unimportant. That the late-night massed forces were a little uneven at times in their performances of Fauré’s Requiem, Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and movements from Brahms’s “German Requiem” was hardly surprising, since they had all come together for the first time at 7:30 that morning and were each busy in their own rehearsals and performances through much of the day.

And most of those individual concerts were wonderful. Mr. Wachner and the Washington Chorus led off with an excellent performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, shorn of three movements to bring it down to the 45- to 50-minute range of most of the concerts. (The walk between the churches over lower Broadway sidewalks crowded with tourists took about eight minutes and proved entertaining, as musicians in concert dress crossed paths, often with instruments or music stands slung over their shoulders.)

The highlights were too numerous to mention. The Copley Singers provided several, including a compelling reading of Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei,” which uses the music of his Adagio pretty much intact and thus (thanks partly to Oliver Stone’s film “Platoon”) carries resonances appropriate to this occasion; and a powerful setting of “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” by a choir member, Andrew Clarkson. The Young People’s Chorus was appealing in numbers picked up on a tour of South America. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem sang a Brahms motet (“Lass Dich Nur Nichts”) with all the polish and fervor that it brought to cantatas by its namesake.

And the many performances of the Trinity Choir from Wednesday through Saturday — and of Mr. Wachner with both of his choirs — were truly remarkable under what could only have been harried circumstances. If there is such a thing as a musical blessing, Trinity Church conferred it on a neighborhood and a city still in need of one.

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2011, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Celebration of Bach, as a Counterpoise to Painful Memories. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe